The Oxford by-election of October 1938 became a referendum on the Munich Agreement of the previous month. As such it was watched closely by Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler. Christopher Farman describes the event.

Frank Prochaska has made a remarkable discovery in the personal library of John Stuart Mill. It proves that Mill not only read the works of his American contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, but was surprisingly harsh in his judgement of him.

Reaction to the death of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry far exceeded the fame of the Belgian-born composer during his lifetime. The cult-like status he achieved beyond the grave reflects the power of music in turbulent times and reveals new attitudes to mourning, says James Arnold.

This is a book about empires and their inability to understand when their time and capacities are exhausted. The empires concerned are those of the Americans, the British and the French in the crucial 20 postwar years when the world was moving from traditional land-based empires to the virtual imperialism of the Cold War. Burleigh’s book draws on a turn which has been shaping a history of the Cold War more generally: the move to the ‘periphery’ away from the centre – that is, away from the machinations in Washington DC and Moscow to the effects of the Cold War in the developing world.

Don’t be misled by the title of Stephen Bending’s new book, Garden Retreats. This well-researched work explores the cultural significance of the garden to well-heeled women living in the 18th century, although there are descriptions of their own gardens. Garden Retreats is divided into three parts, a wordy introduction followed by a section questioning the meaning of retirement – a search for solitude for some or a banishment from polite society for others?

Victorians saw themselves as moral and progressive. They frequently referred to the brutal history that had preceded them. The more benighted the past, the better they seemed. Thus, as Andrew Sanders explains, a great deal of British history before the 18th century was popularly characterised as being ‘little more than a series of judicial executions and violent or untimely deaths. The sad stories of the death of kings were retold with relish and the sword, the axe, the assassin’s dagger and the poisoned cup became a stock in trade of history painting’.

This is a grimly fascinating tale, a comprehensive account of the business of killing and being killed in battle, the gritty commerce of war at the sharp end. How combatants have fought and died is reckoned up in a sort of Grim Reaper’s doomsday book, from the beginnings of recorded history to the confusing and grubby battlefield of today: the slums of Fallujah and the ditches and wadis of Helmand.

What were the influences that helped shape the expectations of the real-life prototypes of Chaucer’s Knight and what were these men’s experiences in the field? These are some of the questions that Timothy Guard seeks to answer in this impressive and richly textured new study.

In recent years Oxford University Press has published handbooks on everything from food history to genocide studies, so it is hardly surprising that room has been found in the series for a volume on witchcraft.

Brian Levack has accordingly assembled a team of 28 contributors, each of whom has provided an essay (or sometimes two), accompanied by suggestions for further reading. Of course, as Levack points out in his introduction, this is far from being the first synthesis of its kind and it naturally invites comparison with its predecessors.